
.A2A3S 



M& 



^AR INFORMATION SERIES 



No. 12 



,•* 



February, 1918 



AMERICAN AND ALLIED 
IDEALS 

AN APPEAL TO THOSE WHO 
ARE NEITHER HOT NOR COLD 




BY 
STUART P. SHERMAN 

Professor of English in the University of Illinois 






Issued by 

THE COMMITTEE ON PUBLIC INFORMATION 

WASHINGTON, D. C. 



Collected set. 



y\*Ti 






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of D? 

ma « re 1918 



AMERICAN AND ALLIED IDEALS 

AN APPEAL TO THOSE WHO ARE NEITHER HOT 
NOR COLD 

By Stuart P. Sherman 
Professor of English in the University of Illinois 

AFTER several months of war it is becoming steadily clearer 
to men of discernment that the victory of our soldiers in 
the trenches will be achieved in vain unless their cause triumphs 
behind their lines. At the present time their cause is still com- 
promised by the lukewarmness of many of our so-called leaders 
of light and learning who, in spite of all their opportunities, 
have not yet discovered what we are fighting about. The 
remedy indicated by the symptoms is beset with grave dangers 
for the unwary. It is a resolute participation, on the part of 
educated men and women, in propaganda for American and 
allied ideals. A more cautious writer would say participation 
in "public information"; but public information is not all that 
I have in mind. In this matter of inculcating American and 
allied ideals, every one awake to the need of the hour should 
be ready to cry in the words attributed by Webster to John 
Adams: "Sir, before God, I believe the hour is come. My 
judgment approves this measure, and my whole heart is in it." 
Let us not mince words: propagandism means zealous campaign- 
ing to make ideals and principles take hold upon characters and 
prevail in conduct. 

Most educated Americans of this generation have been bred 
and trained to look with suspicion upon the propagandist. 
Most of us have been indoctrinated with the ideal which is said 
toguide the investigator in the fields of science, namely to follow 
truth, patiently, dispassionately, wherever it leads, without 
reference to its practical consequences. Accordingly, most of 
us have adopted the attitude of neutral enquirers and expositors. 
We seek to create the impression that we have no axe to grind. 
We have accustomed ourselves to studying and presenting our 
facts with true impartiality, all that there are on one side and 

3 



4 AMERICAN AND ALLIED IDEALS 

all that there are on the other, concealing our point of view, 
abstaining from advocacy, withholding our conclusions, leaving 
the verdict to a jury which our own apparent indifference has 
frequently rendered genuinely indifferent. 

To depart from this position of personal reticence and neu- 
trality is for some of us distasteful and for all of us dangerous, 
unless we know precisely what we are about. To participate, 
in the fever .and excitement of war time, in a zealous campaign 
for political and cultural ideals is frankly to forsake the still air 
of delightful studies for the arena of violent and angry passions. 
It is to be occupied no longer with "mere literature" but with 
high explosives. Just as soon as we come out into the open, 
and proclaim our faith, and bend our efforts towards making a 
powerful application of our ideals to life, towards making our 
faith prevail, just so soon shall we be exposed to three major 
temptations. The first temptation of the propagandist is to 
become a wily liar, betraying the cause which he advocates by 
false emphasis, garbled reports, and the suppression of evidence. 
His second temptation is to become a blind and venomous 
hater of every one and all things that oppose the propagation of 
his faith. His third temptation is to yield to megalomania and 
national egotism — signs of that madness which, according to 
the ancient proverb, appears in those whom God has marked for 
destruction. 

Why run these risks? What extraordinary crisis challenges 
the academic person to emerge from his academic retreat and 
throw all that he has of personal force into the advocacy of 
American and allied ideals? The obvious answer is: The same 
crisis as that which calls upon the soldier to incur the risks of 
wounds and death. The answei is good. It is a sufficient 
answer. But it does not directly illuminate the peculiar tasks 
and responsibilities of scholarship in the war. It will appeal to 
men of "fighting blood"; but I should like to make an answer 
that will appeal also to men who are not of fighting blood, who 
hold themselves somewhat aloof from the combat, and, like that 
eminent Frenchman of letters who has retreated to Switzerland, 
inhabit an air of intellectual tranquillity above the clouds. The 
so-called intellectual class in America is still infested with 
Laodiceans, who think they have done enough if they acquiesce 



AMERICAN AND ALLIED IDEALS 5 

in what others do; and with industrious scholars and men of 
letters who have not yet regarded the war as anything but a 
quite extraordinary nuisance. Like Tennyson's lotos-eaters 
they are still crying, "Let us alone! What pleasure have we to 
war with evil?" Others there are who, contemplating the prostitu- 
tion of contemporary German science, philosophy, and scholar- 
ship to the service of a barbarous government, bitterly oppose 
the contamination of literature by politics, and fearfully appre- 
hend a disaster to truth in any connection of their scholarship 
with the destiny of nations. To such men but one valid justifica- 
tion for engaging in propaganda can be presented: that is, that 
the ideals which they are invited to defend are their own ideals, 
that the American and allied ideals are the ideals of interna- 
tionally-minded men, of scholars, and lovers of peace. I shall 
say something of that; but I wish to lead up to the international 
through the national ideals for the purpose of emphasizing their 
compatibility. 



It is generally agreed among liberal thinkers that a nation 
which does not conduct itself like a beast of prey, a nation 
which has long followed a course of tolerably decent behavior 
at home and abroad, has both a natural and a prescriptive right 
to live. It is a corollary of this agreement that such a nation 
has a right to defend its own life from foreign aggression. I 
think I may even be so bold as to say that defending its own 
life is it's duty and responsibility. I imagine it will also be 
conceded that the life of a nation includes not merely the lives 
and property of living generations, but also the common prin- 
ciples and ideals, the national culture, which these living genera- 
tions have received as a sacred inheritance from their fore- 
fathers, and which they cherish as a priceless possession to be 
bequeathed to their posterity. Finally I suppose we shall 
agree that the United States is such a nation, with such rights, 
such duties, and such ideals and principles. 

These common ideals and principles are the permanent part 
of the nation's life. They constitute the spiritual mold in which 
our fluid thoughts and emotions take the shape of American 



6 AMERICAN AND ALLIED IDEALS 

characters. They establish our fellow citizenship with Franklin 
and Jefferson, with Washington and Lincoln. They are the 
formative forces of that great instrument which some humorous 
genius nicknamed the melting pot. Till the outbreak of the 
present war we have flattered ourselves that the melting pot 
was working fairly well. We have a considerable row of books 
describing its operation, such as Jacob Riis's Making of an 
American Citizen, Mary Antin's Promised Land, Mrs. Stern's 
My Mother and I, Max Ravage's An American in the Making. 
These are all narratives of men and women who came to America 
to become Americans; to break with their national past and to 
reattach themselves to a fresh national tradition. In these 
books one finds the records of the amazing process which trans- 
forms the Scandinavian, the Russian, the Pole, the Roumanian 
into loyal sons and daughters of the Republic, rejoicing in the 
stars and stripes, revering the Pilgrim Fathers, celebrating the 
Day of our Independence, honoring the national heroes, and 
glorying in the national principles and ideals. In ninety-nine 
cases out of a hundred that astounding transformation is ac- 
complished by our general educational system in the schools, 
the colleges, the universities. And it is very largely accom- 
plished by inculcating American ideals through the language 
and literature of America, which as a matter of fact has always 
included the literature of England. The makers and teachers of 
American literature are therefore special custodians of the melting 
pot. If they slumber at their post, the fire goes out, and the 
transformation of aliens and even of the native-born into Ameri- 
cans ceases. 

Since the war, everyone has discovered that there has been 
going on in this country an aggressive campaign to crack the 
pot, to smash the mold of national life. Even before the war, 
many of us were aware that the national culture was being more 
or less systematically attacked from certain quarters by the 
process known as "peaceful penetration." A large body of 
immigrants has been organized to resist the natural operation of 
the American political and cultural environment. They have 
come to America and applied for the privileges of citizenship 
without any intention of becoming citizens in spirit. They 
have sought to preserve unmixed in this country the culture of 



AMERICAN AND ALLIED IDEALS 7 

the country from which they came, and, wherever possible, to 
perpetuate their mother tongue as the preferred language in the 
market, the schools, the newspapers, and the churches. When, 
in such uses, the alien tongue is not regarded as a temporary 
and transitory expedient, it has usurped the place which belongs 
to the language of America. Those who use and seek to main- 
tain it as the preferred language are deliberate colonists for a 
foreign empire, and enemies of the American Republic; and 
their operations, it is heartening to recognize, have been even 
more seriously resented by honest and intelligent naturalized 
citizens than by the native-born. 

Along with such overt attempts to colonize, there has been 
instituted an anti-American campaign of a more insidious char- 
acter, conducted mainly in the English language and ostensibly 
by American citizens. Among its leaders are editors of maga- 
zines, poets, novelists, critics, brewers, and professors' in the 
universities. The program of these men is about as follows: 
attack England; praise Germany; attack everything in America 
that is due to English influence; praise everything in America 
that is due to German influence. Accordingly they sneer at 
the ideals and professions of democratic government; they sneer 
at the Pilgrim Fathers and at all the Puritans who since the 
seventeenth century have constituted the moral backbone of the 
nation; they set themselves against every movement of moral re- 
form; they sneer at all the humanitarian movements associated 
with Christianity; they sneer at those works of American literature 
which we recognize as classical. In short they keep up a con- 
tinuous cannonade against every revered American tradition, 
against every established political ideal, against every accepted 
article of our public and private morality, against everything 
admirable in our social aspirations, against everything charac- 
teristic of the common sense of the American people. On the 
other hand, they celebrate the biological-pontical ideals of 
Prussian statecraft, the biological immoralism of Nietzsche, 
and the literature of Berlin and Vienna, especially that nastiest 
part of it which they are certain will offend what they scoffmgly 
call the Puritanical sensibilities of Americans. 

"Our education," says one of these Prussianizing Americans, 
"our art, and our science are ineradicably German. Our soil 



8 AMERICAN AND ALLIED IDEALS 

itself welcomes a German. The Englishman is, after all, only a 
German with a Norman veneer. In America the veneer drops 
off. By brain-fiber and by blood we are more German than 
English." A second proselyting pilgrim steadily presents for 
our consideration the thought, that America is a "young" 
nation with as yet no "culture" of her own. His purpose is the 
same as that of a third apostle who exclaims despairingly that 
all America, east and west, north and south, is under the relent- 
less sway of Puritan morality, is infatuated with popular educa- 
tion, and adores the idols of democracy. The first, second, and 
the third statements are utterly inconsistent, and the third 
destroys the other two by presenting substantially the truth. It 
acknowledges the fact that we have indeed a powerful and effec- 
tive national culture, while urging that it ought to be destroyed 
and supplanted. The German imperialist who seeks to prepare 
the way for his master by informing us that we are a young 
nation without a national culture is, in plain English, an im- 
pudent, maladroit, and palpable liar. The German imperialist 
who concedes that an old and nation-wide culture has got to be 
destroyed before America can become a vineyard meet for his 
master — such a German has at least the virtue of Prussian 
"realism." 

Now, waiving for the moment the question whether the Ger- 
man or the French or the Turkish or the Japanese or the Jewish 
culture is or is not superior to the American culture, I should 
like to present an important objection to the isolated perpetua- 
tion in this country of an alien culture, or to the attempt to 
assimilate, as it is called, the various cultures of all our aliens. 
The objection is this: Each national culture develops, in response 
to the peculiar needs of the particular people. among whom it 
arises. Its value is directly related to the time and place and 
circumstances of that particular people, and with a change of 
circumstance its peculiar value may largely disappear. As 
every locomotive has its driving rod and its brake, as every 
heart has its diastole and its systole, so every adequate national 
culture must develop a principle of expansion and a principle of 
contraction. I might speak of the principle of contraction in 
the austere family discipline of French life, or in the aristocratic 
code of honor among the Japanese nobility, or in the religious 



AMERICAN AND ALLIED IDEALS 9 

observances of the Mohammedan, or in the minute prescriptions 
of the Mosaic law imposed upon the orthodox Jew. Let us only 
remark that the American who becomes a "cosmopolitan" 
abroad practically never embraces the principles of contraction 
in the countries that he visits; and that the foreigners who come 
to this country almost universally leave the contractive principle 
behind them or lose it in the second generation. The natural 
tendency of the cosmopolitan — the man who thinks he is as- 
similating all cultures — his natural tendency is to embrace the 
expansive principles of all nations and the contractive principles 
of none. But let us confine ourselves to a broad distinction 
between the German and the American cultures. 

The ideal of the German, we infer from what he tells us, is 
external control and "inner freedom"; the Government looks 
after his conduct and he looks after his liberty. The ideal of 
the American is external freedom and inner control; the in- 
dividual looks after his conduct and the Government looks after 
his liberty. Thus Verboten in Germany is pronounced by the 
Government and enforced by the police. In American Verboten 
is pronounced by public opinion and enforced by the individual 
conscience. In this light it should appear that Puritanism, our 
national principle of contraction, is the indispensable check on 
democracy, our national principle of expansion. I use the 
word Puritanism in the sense given to it by German and German- 
American critics: the inner check upon the expansion of natural 
impulse. Now, the Germans coming to America leave behind 
them the rigorous regulative force of the German Government, 
just as the emancipated Jews leave behind them the rigorous 
regulative force of the Mosaic law. They find themselves in a 
country where the good American in ordinary times is practically 
unconscious of any governmental check upon his liberty. Unless 
they are made to understand the check of individual responsi- 
bility which the good American's moral culture imposes upon 
his liberty, they may easily leap to the conclusion that America 
is a paradise for the lawless. If these immigrants, having ac- 
cepted the civic liberty and equality provided by our Govern- 
ment, refuse the correlative restraints and obligations with 
which in America the individual conscience is charged, the 
result is anarchy. 



% 



10 AMERICAN AND ALLIED IDEALS 

We have had anarchy, we are now in the presence of anarchy, 
and we shall continue to have anarchy till we recognize and act 
upon the principle that the American who has not been thor- 
oughly indoctrinated with American ideals is a menace to the 
Republic. Let us have an answer ready for those wheedling 
sophists who urge us to believe that we shall enrich our national 
life by harboring un- Americanized tribes of Russians in Iowa, 
Poles in Pennsylvania, Hungarians in Colorado, or Germans in 
Illinois. Let us say that our democratic government was not 
designed for the effective control of unconverted alien peoples. 
Let us add that history shows few examples of governments that 
are so designed, and that of those few still fewer commend them- 
selves to our admiration. Russia of the czars has attempted 
such control with periodic massacres of the Jews within her 
borders. Turkey of the sultans has attempted it with periodic 
attempts to exterminate the Armenian Christians. Austria- 
Hungary has attempted it; and I read in the Chicago Tribune 
of November 21, 1917, this report of her progress: "Eighty 
thousand persons have been hanged in Austria-Hungary since 
the beginning of the war for political or racial opposition to the 
Government, pacifist activities and separatist propaganda, 
according to estimates here." 

But why seek examples in the old world? The United States 
has attempted it with the result that in the time of a great 
national crisis a big block of hyphenated Americans, united and 
organized without reference to American party divisions, at- 
tempted to bribe and bully Congress and terrorize statesmen 
in the interest of a foreign sovereign. These men were not 
brought under the folds of the American flag by conquest; if 
they had been, we could understand their revolt. But they 
have come into this hospitable land by their own will and choice; 
and now we are forced to conclude that they have come to pull 
down the stars and stripes and to run up the flag of the land 
they have deserted. Their acts strike at the very heart of our 
national life; and the only answer to them is a counterstroke. 
We can no longer afford to let this fact speak for itself: we have 
got to insist that it speak; we have got to speak for it. They 
have kindled the fire of an alien propaganda and self-preserva- 
tion demands the counterfire of an American propaganda. 



AMERICAN AND ALLIED IDEALS 11 

They are zealous and impassioned workers for a German Kultur, 
and we must be zealous and impassioned workers for American 
culture or American culture will be swept out of its own rightful 
home and heritage on American soil. It is one thing to fight 
for American ideals in Berlin and Vienna, and quite another 
thing to fight for American ideals in New York and Chicago. 
Liberty, equality, and fraternity does not imply my right to go 
into my neighbor's house, and throw out his gods and goods, 
and install my gods and goods in his place — not even if I have a 
big club and he has no club at all. The inheritor of American 
ideals who is not willing to throw the weight of his character 
and passion against a usurpation like this is something less than 
an American. I think he is a kind of tedious old ghost who 
should be put into petticoats and set to knitting mufflers for the 
governors of Belgium. 

II 

Up to this point in our argument we have been discussing 
propaganda for American ideals on American soil. We are in 
little danger as yet of incurring the mendacity, hatred, and 
megalomania which beset the path of the propagandist. For 
here is no question whether Americans or Germans shall rule 
the world. It is only a question whether Germans or Americans 
shall rule in America. And to that question we can answer 
truthfully, kindly and humbly that Americans have the prior 
claim. But let us turn now from domestic to international 
relations, where lying, hating, and megalomania are ordinarily 
called into play to second the efforts of world politicians. 

I have heard one of our prophets declaring that either Germany 
or America is destined to rule the world, and that on the whole 
he hopes it will be America. If I may speak out of my own 
convictions, there is one thing more abhorrent to my conscience 
than that Germany should dominate the world by force of arms. 
That one more abhorrent thing is that America should dominate 
the world by force of arms. When a man execrates on the part 
of a foreign nation a course which he praises on the part of his 
own nation; when a man curses Germany because it is militaristic 
and then rebukes America because it is not militaristic; when a 



12 AMERICAN AND ALLIED IDEALS 

man reviles the Germans for crying, "On to Calais" and then 
turns to his fellow countrymen crying, "On to Panama"; when 
a man ridicules the Germans for calling themselves God's chosen 
people, and then turns to the Americans and calls them God's 
chosen people; when a man upbraids the Germans for shouting 
right or wrong my country, and then turns to the Americans 
shouting right or wrong my country — confronted by this bull- 
' headed preposterous nationalism the experienced Muse of history 
bursts into scornful laughter; he that sitteth in the heavens 
turns away his face; and Americans in the midst of this horrible 
slaughter are properly admonished to prepare for the next war! 

Nor can we escape from the derisive laughter of the Immortals 
by talking about the Anglo-Saxons. Only one degree removed 
from the preposterous nationalist is the preposterous Anglo- 
Saxon. I feel fairly intimate with the ideals of America; they 
are mine. I know something of the ideals of England; they 
are allied to America's. But what are the Anglo-Saxon ideals? 
Do they include Disraeli's, Mr. Lloyd George's, or Mr. Wilson's? 
For that matter, who are the Anglo-Saxons — other than those 
Germanic tribes that drove back the Celtic and Pictish an- 
cestors of our Scotch-Irish Presidents? I do not see how the 
American scholar's sympathies can be strongly enlisted in a feud 
in behalf of the Anglo-Saxon blood. What stake have the 
countrymen of Lafayette in a blood feud of the Anglo-Saxons? 
Or the countrymen of Garibaldi? Or the countrymen of Ker- 
ensky? Or the Japanese? Or the Brazilians? Or the Portuguese? 
Or the people of China and Siam? The ties of blood and race 
count for next to nothing in this conflict. The English-speaking 
peoples have no monopoly in the ideals of the Allies. The 
American who now raises the flag of Anglo-Saxonism raises a 
meaningless symbol which insults the pride of millions of his 
fellow countrymen and most of the Allies, and may well challenge 
the Orient to muster and drill her millions for the next war. 

Appeals to race prejudice, to a purely self-regarding patriotism, 
to the old-fashioned nationalism, happily do not nowadays 
always carry conviction to the intellectual class to which 
educated men are alleged to belong. Many of them have 
banished race prejudice as a relic of tribal days. Many of 
them are convinced that national pride needs a schoolmaster; 



AMERICAN AND ALLIED IDEALS 13 

and are glad that it has one! They have studied the world 
upheaval in which the nations now quake; they have searchingly 
scrutinized their own consciences; and many of them have 
reached the conclusion that the master cause of this tragedy, of 
which all the world's the stage, is precisely the old self-regarding 
nationalism — the nationalism which glorifies power and has 
no principle of contraction to oppose to its principle of expansion. 
When they hear Germans shouting " Deutschla?id uberAlles" and 
Americans shouting " A merica uber A lies" their hearts refuse to 
rally to either call. 

They say that the only way to avoid brutal and hideous 
clashes of international strife for national expansion is to stop 
this barbaric shouting; and to set up and establish supernational 
ideals and principles which shall impose an effective check upon 
the indefinitely expansive principle of nationality. Some of our 
statesmen tell us that it cannot be done. They declare that 
they are too stupid to contrive the machinery of international 
government. We do not altogether believe them. We have a 
very great confidence in both the ingenuity and the power of 
statesmen; and it is based upon experience. We believe that 
statesmen can do anything that they have a mind to do. We 
believe in the ingenuity and power of statesmen, because we see 
them all around the world accomplishing much more difficult 
and incredible things, such, for example, as persuading great 
nations to pledge their last dollar and their last man and to 
walk through the valley of the shadow of hideous death to sup- 
port a statesman's word, plighted perhaps without their knowl- 
edge or consent. From that spectacle we derive our belief that 
when statesmen heartily apply their ingenuity to contriving 
what the hearts of all the plain people of the world desire, they 
will be not a little surprised to discover the easiness of the task 
and the inexhaustible power behind them. 

Where shall we find the supernational principles and powers 
which we wish our statesmen to establish, which we demand 
that they shall establish? We shall find them in the cause for 
which America and her associates are now fighting. Cynics 
may say that each of the Allies is fighting for its own special 
interest, its own peculiar culture, its trade, to recover this or that 
bit of territory, to annex this or that province or port, Doubt- 



14 AMERICAN AND ALLIED IDEALS 

less selfish motives do enter to some extent into the practical 
considerations of most of the Governments, just as brutal and 
selfish men enter into the armies. But unless the leading 
spokesmen of the Allies are black-hearted liars, they are about 
a nobler business than national buccaneering. And whatever 
the Governments are about, we are profoundly convinced that 
the great mass of the people of the Allies are not cynics and do 
not intend to be dupes; that they are not fighting for ports and 
provinces and trade; that they are fighting for the common 
interests of the whole family of civilized nations — for nothing 
less than the cause of mankind. They can unite from the ends 
of the earth as one people, sinking their national peculiarities, 
because they are drawn by a bond deeper than language or 
nationality or race; they are drawn by the bond that unites the 
commonwealth of nations. They are not fighting for French or 
English or American law, justice, truth, and honor, but for 
international law, international truth, international justice, 
international honor. 

The new national pride and patriotism developed by this 
conflict finds its basis in the service which each nation renders 
to the cause above all nations, the cause of civilized society, the 
cause of civilized man. The new type of patriot no longer cries, 
"my country against the world," but "my country for the world." 
The moment that he takes that attitude he finds no more hos- 
tility between the idea of. nationalism and the idea of inter- 
nationalism than between the idea of a company and the idea 
of a regiment, or the idea of a State and the idea of a nation. 
As each good citizen's loyalty to his State accepts a principle of 
control in his loyalty to his nation, so his loyalty to his nation 
accepts a principle of control in his loyalty to the general family 
of nations. 

Here is the great fact which challenges the loyalty of every 
humane man. Propaganda for America and the Allies is not to 
be urged to the disadvantage of any nation whatsoever, pro- 
vided only that each nation is willing to behave like a member of 
a family of nations, provided only that it will accept for its con- 
duct outside its borders the fundamental principles of civilization. 
Our propaganda is not for separatism and exclusion. It is 
rather our profound conviction that there is no room left in the 



- AMERICAN AND ALLIED IDEALS 15 

world for barbarians, for heathen tribes without the law. 
Humanity is not safe while any nation professes inhumanity. 
We are not fighting to put the Germans out but to get them in. 
Furthermore we have got to take the Orient in, frankly and 
fully; or in all probability we or our children, or oui children's 
children, will have to fight the Orient. To some of us the in- 
fluence upon the Orient of the German rebellion against the 
Family of Nations appears as not the least ominous and dreadful 
aspect of the present war. 

If out of the infinite travail of this war there is to come a new 
birth of national freedom under international law, if these our 
numberless dead are not to have died in vain, we must keep our 
.great war aims ever vividly before us. We must not merely 
defeat our adversaries but also establish the principles for which 
we drew the sword. If in the day of victory the apathy of en- 
lightened men permits reactionaries and old-fashioned statesmen 
to arrange a peace under which the nations revert to the former 
state of international anarchy and competitive preparations for 
fresh conflicts, the spirits of millions of bemocked and victimized 
young dead men should rise from their graves to protest against 
the great betrayal. To insure that the war shall end as a purg- 
ing tragedy and not as an empty farce we need now and shall 
need for a long time to come impassioned expositors of the laws 
of man and God, profaned by the enemy and defended by America 
and the Allies. 

The first duty of the propagandist is to determine what the 
ideals and principles of the Allies are; and this involves deter- 
mining what they are not. One can best discover what they 
are not by reading modern German literature, German news- 
papers, German ethics and politics, the works of Schopenhauer, 
Nietzsche, Treitschke, Bernhardi, Hartmann, etc. If time is 
short, one can quickly sharpen one's consciousness of what our 
ideals are not by reading daily one or two selections from an 
anthology of German thought, such as is contained in Conquest 
and Kultur, published by the Committee on Public Information. 
In this literature one will make acquaintance with the Kaiser's 
tribal god who has merited the iron cross for his able support of 
the strategy of the German General Staff, the god who is to 
stand arm in arm with the Kaiser reviewing his Uhlans on the 



16 AMERICAN AND ALLIED IDEALS 

Day of Judgment. There one will find the leaders of German 
thought deifying a State with no aspect of deity but power; 
denying the right of small nations to live; reviving old and in- 
stituting new forms of slavery; affirming that might is right; 
defending ohe ravishment of Belgium; rejoicing in the Lusitania 
massacre; glorifying Schrecldichkeit; recommending that ships of 
friendly neutrals should be spurlos versenkt; advocating keeping 
subject peoples in ignorance and misery; chanting the holiness of 
war and hoping that it may last forever; extolling war as the 
prime element in their Kultur; and proudly declaring their 
opposition to the establishment on earth of the kingdom of 
righteousness and peace. There one will find the ideals and 
principles of a Government which has covenanted with death 
and agreed with hell. 

The propagandist can do good service by holding these ideas 
up to execration, not because they are German ideas but because 
they are ideas hostile to the commonwealth of man. And if by 
chance any spokesman of the Allied nations falls into the error 
of saying anything resembling these ideas, the propagandist 
may perform equally good service by pointing out with emphasis 
that he speaks like one of the depraved leaders of German thought 
and an enemy of the Allies. 

His happiest occupation, however, should be the discovery, 
collection, and enthusiastic promulgation on every proffered 
occasion of the ideals of the Allies. This kind of propaganda 
has not yet received the attention it deserves. The tendency 
has been to expose the perversity and iniquity of the enemy's 
aims and to take for granted the righteousness and justice of 
our own. As the war proceeds, the Allied nations are steadily 
drawn by necessity to fight fire with fire; to parry the blow of an 
autocratic Government, they have had to make their own 
Governments temporarily autocratic; to meet the rush of a 
nation in arms, they have had to put their own nations in arms; 
to resist the assault of a people trained to sacrifice all to the 
State, they have been compelled for the nonce to demand a 
similar sacrifice. As all the participants in this dreadful melee 
become more and more deeply imbrued in the blood and wrath 
of combat, it grows increasingly difficult to distinguish by their 
external aspects the victim from the assassin. This hour when 



AMERICAN AND ALLIED IDEALS 17 

his hands are subdued to the dark color of the bleeding mire 
wherein he grapples with the foe is the bitter hour for the idealist. 
It is the hour of sinister opportunity for the man who builds his 
philosophy upon the incorrigible baseness of our human natures. 
It is then that the cynic and the reactionary croak and shout: 
"You are all tarred with the same brush. We bet on the black- 
est. Fall to! and the devil take the hindmost." This is the 
hour when it tremendously concerns us to be reminded who 
began the war and what it is about. This is the hour when it 
behooves us to remember that our soldiers are defending the 
causes which our statesmen define. It is the business of the 
strategists of international idealism to demand that the armies 
of the Allies shall never fight for a cause unworthy of the com- 
monwealth of man. 

Where shall we look for the ideals of the Allies? Primarily, 
perhaps, in the utterances of the Allied statesmen at the present 
time and in the vast literature of the conflict. Take, if you like, 
Siam's statement of its reasons for entering the war, to "uphold 
the sanctity of international rights against nations showing a 
contempt of humanity." Or take Mr. Wilson's statement that 
our motive is not "revenge or the victorious assertion of the 
physical might of the nation, but only the vindication of right, 
of human right, of which we are only a single champion"; or 
his other statement that we fight "for a universal dominion 
of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace 
and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last 
free." 

It should be a great source of inspiration and confidence to 
recognize that the ideals of the Allies have been the ideals of 
just men in all ages; so that we may find them, most of them, 
expressed in all the great literatures of the world, ancient and 
modern, including the literature of the great Germans of the 
eighteenth century. Contemporary German thought is pre- 
historic, reversionary, paradoxical. It seeks to fly against the 
great winds of time, to row against the deep current of human 
purposes, to ignore the grand agreements of civilized men, and 
to seek its sanction in the unconscious law of the jungle. The 
Allies are seeking to cooperate with the power not ourselves 
which has been struggling for righteousness through the entire 



18 AMERICAN AND ALLIED IDEALS 

history of man; and their cause will be borne forward by the 
confluent moral energies of all times and peoples. 

It was to Goethe that Arnold generously gave credit for the 
idea of an international republic of intellectual men, an idea 
precious to every scholar and man of letters. "Let us conceive, " 
said Arnold, "of the whole group of civilized nations as being, 
for*intellectual and spiritual purposes, one great confederation 
whose members have a due knowledge both of the past out of 
which they all proceed, and of one another. This was the 
idea of Goethe, and it is an ideal which will impose itself upon 
the thoughts of our modern societies more and more." It was 
Goethe who said: "National hatred is something peculiar. You ' 
will always find it strongest where there is the lowest degree of 
culture. And there is a degree where it vanishes altogether 
and where one stands to a certain extent above nations." These 
are ideals of the Allies, now scoffed at by the depraved leaders 
of the thought of. Goethe's countrymen. 

Mr. Roosevelt has discovered the cause of the Allies in the 
words of Micah: "What more doth the Lord require of thee 
than to do justice and love mercy and to walk humbly with thy 
God?" Another of the Prophets, as if foreseeing the advice 
given by the German General Staff to the God of the German 
armies, expressed an ideal of the Allies when he said: "Who hath 
directed the Spirit of the Lord, or being his Counsellor hath 
taught him? . . . Behold, the nations are as a drop of a 
bucket, and are counted as the small dust of the balance. . . . 
All nations before him are as nothing; and they are counted to 
him less than nothing and vanity. . . . [When his spirit 
is poured from on high] judgment shall dwell in the wilderness, 
and righteousness remain in the fruitful field. And the work of 
righteousness shall be peace; and'the effect of righteousness, quietness 
and assurance forever." 

Confucius expressed an ideal of the Allies, "very dear to the 
heart of all Americans, when he said: "People despotically 
governed and kept in order by punishment may avoid infrac- 
tion of the law, but they will lose their moral sense. People 
virtuously governed and kept in order by the inner law of self- 
control will retain their moral sense, and moreover become 
good." 



AMERICAN AND ALLIED IDEALS 19 

Cicero expressed a majestic ideal of the Allies, when he said: 
"True law is right reason conformable to nature, universal, 
unchangeable, eternal, whose commands urge us to duty, and 
whose prohibitions restrain us from evil. . . . Neither the 
senate nor the people can give us any dispensation for not 
obeying this universal law of justice. . . . It is not one 
thing at Rome, and another at Athens; one thing to-day, and 
another to-morrow; but in all times and nations this universal 
law must forever reign, eternal and imperishable. It is the 
sovereign master and emperor of all things. God himself is its 
author, its promulgator, its enforcer. And he who does not 
obey it flies from himself, and does violence to the very nature 
of man." 

English literature, especially since the seventeenth century 
when the divine right of kings received its death blow, is full of 
expressions of Allied ideals. Milton implies one in Paradise 
Regained: — 

They err who count it glorious to subdue 

By conquest far and wide, to overrun 

Large countries, and in field great battles win, 

Great cities by assault; what do these worthies 

But rob and spoil, burn, slaughter, and enslave 

Peaceable nations, neighboring or remote 

Made captive, yet deserving freedom more 

Than those their conquerors, who leave behind 

Nothing but ruin wheresoe'r they rove 

And all the flourishing works of peace destroy.* 

And Milton expresses an ideal of the Allies for the period follow- 
ing the war: "If after being released from the toils of war, you 
neglect the arts of peace ... if you think it is a more 
grand, or a more beneficial, or a more wise policy, to invent 
subtle expedients for increasing the revenue, to multiply our 
naval and military force, to rival in craft the ambassadors of 
foreign States, to form skillful treaties and alliances, than to 
administer unpolluted justice to the people, to redress the in- 
jured, to succor the distressed, and speedily to restore to every 
one his own, you are involved in a cloud of error, and too late 
you will perceive, when the illusion of those mighty benefits has 

*Quoted by E. de Selincourt in English Poets and the National Ideal. 



20 AMERICAN AND ALLIED IDEALS 

vanished, that in neglecting these,, you have only been pre- 
cipitating your own ruin and despair." 

The literature of France, especially since the French Revolu- 
tion, is full of the ideals of the Allies. For France I will quote a 
few lines from the essay by Victor Giraud on French civilization, 
recently published in this country by the Department of Romance 
Languages of the University of Michigan: 

"France has never been able to believe that force alone, the 
force of pride and brute strength, could be the last word in the 
affairs of this world. She has never admitted that science could 
have for its ultimate purpose to multiply the means of destruc- 
tion and oppression, and it was one of her old writers, Rabelais, 
who pronounced these memorable words: 'Science without con- 
science is the ruin of the soul.' She has not been able to con- 
ceive that an ethnic group, a particular type of mind, should 
have the right to suppress others: instead of a rigid and mechani- 
cal uniformity of thought and life, the ideal to which she aspires 
is that of the free play, spontaneous development, and the living 
harmony of the nations of the world." 

In the response of the South American States to the appeal of 
the cause of the Allies, deep has called unto deep. No novel 
circumstance, no momentary impulse, no revelation of yesterday 
has revealed to the Latin-American peoples their essential com- 
munity of interest with France, with England, with the United 
States of the North. Through all temporary misunderstandings 
and estrangements, they have remembered that they are kindred 
offspring of one great emancipative idea, inheritors of a common 
political purpose, pilgrims to a common goal. Through the con- 
fusions of desperate wars Simon Bolivar, the Washington of their 
revolutions, led them a hundred years ago to the threshold of the 
new world of national independence, civic equality, liberty, 
popular sovereignty and justice. He, man of strife though he had 
to be, cherished lifelong his fond dream of a parliament of man, 
and in the evening of his life summoned on the Isthmus of 
Panama a congress of nations, which he intended should present 
a united front to imperial aggression, become the perpetual source 
and guarantor of public law, and establish concord among all 
peace-loving peoples. From that day to this the statesmen of 
South America have been with increasing earnestness and 



AMERICAN AND ALLIED IDEALS 21 

effectiveness the friends of arbitral justice and the architects of 
international peace. 

What shall I say of America but that the ideals for which the 
Allies are now every day more consciously fighting presided over 
her birth as a nation and have been her guiding stars in all the 
high moments of her history? I mean that the American nation, 
established at an epoch of intellectual expansion, was to a re- 
markable degree founded upon international principles by men 
of international outlook and sympathies. Our founders in 
general claimed nothing for Americans but what they were will- 
ing and anxious to concede to all men; so that it has ever been a 
splendid tradition of the American Government, when about to 
take a momentous step, frankly to state its case, and openly to 
invite the considerate judgment — not of Americans — but of 
mankind, thus checking the expansive principle of nationalism 
by the contractive principle of a supernational allegiance. 

America, furthermore, has never established the worship of a 
tribal or national deity. The God invoked by the framers of 
our Declaration of Independence, our Constitution, our Con- 
gress, our Courts, and by our great Presidents, has quite obvi- 
ously, I think, been approached as the Father of Mankind. 
The eighteenth century deists — men like Paine, Franklin, and 
Jefferson — had indeed thoroughly repudiated the idea of a 
warlike tribal Jehovah; the qualities which they habitually 
attributed to the deity were justice and benevolence; and these 
characteristics have remained, I believe, the leading ones in 
what we may call oui national conceptions of divinity. And 
how has our national faith in a Father of all Mankind been re- 
flected in our political conceptions? Well, Benjamin Franklin 
said in the midst of a great war: "Justice is as strictly due 
between neighbour Nations as between neighbour citizens 
. . . and a Nation which makes an unjust war is only a great 
Gang." And our Declaration of Independence holds that the 
God of nature has made it self-evident that all men are created 
equal and endowed with inalienable rights to life, liberty, and 
the pursuit of happiness. Washington, in his Farewell Address, 
expresses his faith that Providence has connected the permanent 
felicity of a nation with its virtue; accordingly he urges his 
countrymen to forego temporary national advantages, and to 



22 AMERICAN AND ALLIED IDEALS 

try the novel experiment of always acting nationally on princi- 
ples of "exalted justice and benevolence." Jefferson, in his first 
inaugural, felicitates his countrymen on the fact that religion 
in America, under all its various forms, inculcates "honesty, 
truth, temperance, gratitude, and the love of man." Liberty, 
equality, justice, benevolence, truth — these are not tribal ideals. 

All these ideals which our national fathers derived from the 
Father of all Nations, Lincoln received and cherished as a sacred 
heritage, and he added something precious to them. • He took 
them into his great heart and quickened them with his own warm 
sense of human brotherhood, with his instinctive gentleness and 
compassion for all the children of men. "With malice towards 
none; with charity for all; with firmness for the right, as God 
gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we 
are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall 
have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan — to 
do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace 
among ourselves, and with all nations." Why do these words, 
uttered near the bitter end of a long war, touch us so deeply, 
and thrill us year after year? Because in them the finest mor- 
ality of the individual American is identified at last with the 
morality of the nation. The words consecrate the loftiest of all 
American ideals, namely, that the conduct of the nation shall 
be inspired by a humanity so pure and exalted that the humanest 
citizen may realize his highest ideals in devotion to it. 

That ideal still animates the American people. We are not 
sending out our young men to-day to fight for a State which 
acknowledges no duty but the extension of its own merciless 
power. We are sending them out to fight for a State which 
finds its highest duty in the defense and extension of justice and 
mercy. Our national purpose has been solemnly rededicated to 
the objects of the canonized Father and the Preserver of the 
Republic. We are not to break with our great traditional aspira- 
tion towards the expression in the State of the civility, morality, 
and responsibility of the humanest citizens. In the noble words 
of Mr. Wilson's recent address: "The hand of God is laid upon 
the nations. He will show them favor, I devoutly believe, only 
if they rise to the clear heights of his own justice and mercy." 
So believe all just men. 



AMERICAN AND ALLIED IDEALS 23 

Here then let us close our appeal to those who have drawii 
apart from this our war and have sought for their emotions a 
neutral place of refuge above the conflict. The cause of America 
and the Allies is the defense of the common culture of the family 
of civilized nations. It is the cause of the commonwealth of 
man. The ideals and principles which we wish to take hold of 
character and govern conduct are the best principles and ideals 
that men have. We need not fear the perils that beset the 
propagandist if we have once a clear vision of the object of our 
propaganda. We need not fear lest we become wily liars, for 
our very object is that central human truth which is the object 
of all knowledge. We need not fear lest we become venomous 
haters, for our very object is the inculcation of the sense of 
human brotherhood and human compassion. We need not fear 
lest we become besotted nationalists, for our very object is the 
inculcation of a sense for those common things which should 
be precious to all men, everywhere, at all times. We have drawn 
the sword to defend what Cicero beautifully called, "the country 
of all intelligent beings." 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 
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